Path Apologizes For Contact Uploads, Deletes Data

Social network Path apologized for uploading its users' address books from their phones without their consent.

The issue came to light earlier this week when a developer named Arun Thampi tried to build a Path app for Mac OS X. Thampi discovered that Path automatically uploaded the contact info for all of a user's address book. Path initially responded by saying that the company was just doing this in order to identify other friends that users already may know on the social network. But uproar in the press made it clear that that was not going to satisfy users.

Path cofounder and CEO Dave Morin today announced that the company is deleting all uploaded address book data and changing the app, a new version of which can be downloaded on iOS or Android, so that it is opt-in for users to provide this contact information to Path.

Morin, the former head of Facebook's third party platform, explains in the blog post why Path uploaded the data: "In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else. We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection. It is also stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology."

Path was one of the more prominent and arguably important new Internet/mobile products in recent months when it relaunched in late November 2011. Now Morin and his team are seeking to get ahead of this issue. Other prominent startups such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Facebook have dealt with major privacy or user trust crises and generally emerged intact afterwards. By admitting they had made a mistake and doing everything possible to fix it, companies were able to get ahead of the problem and satisfy their users' concerns. It's still early but Path looks to have done that today.